Project Guardian
by MiccaAbernathy
Summary: Micca Owens. A marine turned experiment. She has no memory of Alice, but she knows that she's important to her. Will love prevail, or it fail in light of devastating truths?


Project Guardian

Chapter One

Colonel Micca Owens sat back in the old, dusty computer chair, and pressed her thumbs to her temples with a heavy sigh. She heard the red-head lounging on the ragged couch behind her turn her head to look in her direction. After two years, it still unsettled Micca how much she could hear, smell and see.

"Anything?" Claire asked gently.

The pair had come to this particular Umbrella office building with the hopes of finding any information on Micca's project. The subject: Micca herself. During her last tour of Afghanistan, Micca had been critically injured and sent home in a coma. When she woke up, she was in a post apocalyptic world, and irrevocably changed by experiments that Umbrella Co. had conducted. She was barely human anymore. She had met Claire shortly after she had escaped the facility and the two had been together ever since, surviving and looking for answers about what had been done to Micca.

The Colonel peered back at the screen of the company computer she was hacked into and shook her head, "No, not yet," she stood up and stretched her stiff muscles, "It's still decrypting."

The brunette turned when she heard the couch cushions shifting as her friends sat up and met Claire's eyes with her own. Claire grinned, "Take a nap, Micca. I'll wake you when it's done."

Micca started to protest but was effectively silenced when the shorter woman raised an eyebrow at her in silent challenge. The veteran may be physically stronger and faster than the former police officer but there was no way in hell that she would be able to win an argument. Micca relented and switched places with her. The experiment didn't need as much sleep as her human counterpart, but she was running on fumes at this point. She knew that she could go three days without sleep and she was edging on four. Micca hated to admit it, but she _was _exhausted.

The older woman stretched out on the dusty old couch, kicked up her feet and pillowed her head on a folded arm, "Claire-," she started but was cut off.

"Go to sleep, Micca. I'll be right here." Her friend was nothing if not protective. Extraordinarily so. It was a quality that, while occasionally irritating, Claire valued greatly. She had never trusted someone as completely as she trusted Micca. Claire knew beyond any doubt that Micca had her back.

But Micca forgot to take care of herself. She was so concerned with everyone else that she forgot about herself. So Claire made it her personal responsibility to make sure that her friend took care of herself, too. Whether that was to remind her to sleep or eat, or give her comfort when she needed it, Claire would be there for her and Micca knew that. They valued each other, and that was something special.

Micca didn't respond. Instead, she rolled onto her side and almost immediately her breathing evened out and her body relaxed and went completely still. Claire marveled at her ability to go to sleep anywhere on demand, and settled back into the decaying chair for a long couple of hours.

Pain, anger, blood, violence. Scorching, screeching, screaming, slashing. White, green, blue, red. Fear. Searing, bleeding, blackness pain. Scalding needle points.

_Micca_…

Scorching, white, blood, screaming. Violence, pain. Red, Screeching, fear, blood. Blackness, crushing, grinding. Green, blue helixes.

_Micca…!_

Screeching, green, anger. Blood, red, blue, slashing. Fear. Blackness, bleeding broken. _I hurt!_ Him! Kill him! Copper-taste. Snapping, splinters, blackness, pain. _Where? What?_

Micca!

Running, running, violence, blood. Blackness, green. Claire? _No._ Fear—

"Micca, wake up it's a dream."

Voice. _Know voice. Scent of green...Who?-_

Micca blinked herself awake and sat up. She rubbed her head. She felt as if something important had just slipped through her fingers. She couldn't remember her dream. She frowned.

Claire noticed the furrow of her friend's brow, a skill unforgotten from her life as an officer, and asked with concern, "What is it?"

Micca shrugged, "I don't know. It's like I just tried to remember something but it's gone now." She sounded far away, even to herself. She shook her head, "Is it done?" she asked, ignoring the concern on Claire's face.

Claire took the hint and allowed the change in subject, "Yeah, just now." She knew that Micca didn't like to discuss the gaps in her memory or their connection to her dreams. It made the older woman feel vulnerable, which was something she refused to be, considering past experience.

Micca got to her feet and took up residence in the old chair in front of the computer. Claire hovered behind her, reading over her shoulder.

Micca scrolled through the list of files, not entirely sure what it was she was looking for. She paused, mouse hovering over a file labeled 'Guardian'. The colonel chewed her lip and shifted uneasily in her seat as she read the name. She clicked on it and an image appeared on the screen. Micca's own ice blue eyes peered back at her from her military photo.

"You were a marine?" Claire asked softly from over Micca's shoulder.

"I'm still a marine," Micca replied on reflex, but it was true. Once a marine, always a marine. That didn't go away just because you stopped wearing the uniform. Micca read over the information on her profile, and found nothing significant until she came to a link labeled only as 'Project A.'. She opened it, and a photo of a woman with sandy blonde hair and cool green eyes arose on the screen. Micca knew in her heart that this woman was someone important to her, but she had no memory of her. She felt it was there, but whatever it was was just out of reach.

She wanted to continue reading about this woman and the link between them, and this _Project Guardian_, but a loud, metallic screech that she knew so well echoed from down the hall, accompanied by the stench of infection and decay.

"Time to go," Micca said as she plugged a thumb drive into the computer and pressed download.

Claire sat in the passenger seat of their yellow hummer, bent over the open laptop in her lap, re-reading the files they had stolen while Micca crouched outside lighting a fire for the night. Micca was still pondering over what she had learned.

"I wonder who and where this 'Alice' is," Claire said finally as she closed the laptop and climbed out of the car to join Micca by the fire.

"Whoever she is, it's clear that I was built for her."

Claire nodded and listened to the quiet stillness of the desert around them and the gentle, comforting crackle of the fire. She pried open a can of chili they had acquired last week at an old gas station that hadn't been looted yet and set it by the fire to heat through, "Yeah, but why?" she mused, "And why keep you separated if you're two halves of a whole?"

Micca sighedand, pressed her thumb to her temple; something she did when she was worried or frustrated, "I don't know. Something must have gone wrong," she mused, "If only I could remember my dream. All I get are flashes I can't make sense of. But something in there is important. I can feel it."

Claire watched her friend struggle internally with herself, and then reached out to take one of her hands, "Hey, It'll be okay. We'll figure it out."

Micca smiled softly at her friend. She hoped it were true.

A tall, slender figure picked her way through the debris littering the decaying halls of the abandoned Umbrella facility. She stepped over undead and bioweapon corpses with unsettling silence, wrinkling her sensitive nose against the smell of rot permeating them. She pushed her darkening blonde hair back from her face with one gloved hand while the other held her handgun relaxed at her side. Her cool green eyes scanned the surroundings for any sign of danger.

She paused in front of an open doorway-not because it was the _only_ open door in the hall-but because of the scent coming from the room beyond and trailing down the opposite end of the corridor. Spice and wet earth as familiar to Alice as it was captivating, made her heart leap into her throat and her chest tighten, constricting the intake of air.

She was already behind the desk before she had noticed she was moving. Her heart was racing and pounding against her ribs, threatening to burst. The image that came up on screen knocked the wind from her lungs. "Micca," she whispered to the empty room. She had been there only hours before. Alice scrolled through the open files, trying to understand what the other experiment had been doing there.

"You were looking for answers," Alice observed, again speaking to the empty air.

With trembling hands, Alice typed a few command codes to open the company tracer program. She had to do this quickly or Umbrella would find the both of them, but she needed to find Micca as much as she needed air to breathe. Blood rushed in her ears as she keyed in some more prompts. The sense of urgency made it difficult to breathe. She released a breath she hadn't realized she had been holding when the satellite infrared image appeared on the monitor. It was a vehicle travelling through the desert. She tracked the vehicle's trajectory and prayed it wouldn't change before she found it. Alice quickly closed the program and left.

She was going home.

Micca turned to look over her shoulder at Claire asleep in the backseat of the hummer, having heard her shifting around uneasily. She waited to see if she was having another nightmare, then returned her attention to the laptop. She would let Claire to sleep a little longer. There was still around half an hour before daybreak and she needed the rest.

Micca exhaled and arched her back then something in the distance about a football field away caught her eye. Even from so far away she could see every detail of the woman's face. Her breath hitched in her chest. Running against the orange and red backdrop of the rising sun was the most magnificent creature she had ever seen, with a familiar face.

It was the clatter of the laptop as it fell from her lap when she stood that woke Claire up. The redhead opened her eyes to find Micca standing, open-mouthed as she gazed off in the far distance. She got up and grabbed her service gun and joined her friend, and followed her gaze out among the dunes to see what had captivated Micca. She couldn't make out nearly as many details as the experiment standing beside her, but she could definitely tell that it was a person running along the crest of the sand.

"What is it?" She asked her companion.

"It's...Alice," the older woman replied, still in disbelief. Claire looked at her sharply.

"You're sure?"

Micca nodded in silent reply, neither woman noticing the flow of tears cascading down Micca's cheeks. Whatever Alice was running from crested the hill of sand behind her, and whipped out its mutant tongue, catching her ankle and sending her tumbling down the sand.

Micca didn't think. She didn't have time to think. A surge of indescribable protective rage bubbled up inside her and a ferocious, savage snarl snapped violently and loudly past her bared and gritted teeth and she rocketed forward at an inhuman speed.

Alice yelled as her foot was yanked from under her, and she plummeted to the sand, and tumbled end over end down the hill. The Licker roared viciously in imminent victory behind her and the blonde struggled to halt her descent and regain her footing.

Finally, the motion stopped and Alice rolled onto her back, searching frantically for her pistols after realizing she had lost them in her fall. Her heart bottomed out in her stomach when she saw them lying too far away for her to reach before the Licker reached her. She looked back at the monster just in time to see it raise its ugly, mutant claws, ready to swing down and rend her flesh from bone. She braced herself as the inevitable descent began.

There was a blur of motion, and the scent of spice and wet earth and a grotesque, sharpened claw halted scant millimeters away from Alice's nose. Time slowed down just long enough for icy blue eyes to meet cold wintergreen. Alice took in the sight of the woman she had longed for for so many years and a relieved smile spread across her face. Micca glanced away, and time resumed.

With an angry yell, Micca gripped the licker more firmly, and with her unnatural strength threw the lion-sized creature bodily through the air, far away from Alice, who had gotten back to her feet and now watched Micca face off with the beast. A low, rumbling growl reverberated through her chest, warning the licker off. Every angle of Micca's frame was sharp with protective aggression, poised to leap and kill when the time arose. Her figure trembled with it.

Unbelievably, the Licker screeched warily and turned away. Micca stood there until the aggression melted from her body and the beast was long out of her sight. She panted to catch her breath again as she watched the sun peek over the dune. Alice stepped to an arm's length away, and studied the other experiment intently. Micca turned her head to meet her gaze. When their eyes met, an entire silent conversation took place. Micca didn't remember, but she knew that Alice was her everything, in every possible way.

A magical, rough and gravelly voice jarred Micca from her thoughts, "Hey, Micca. It's been a long time."


End file.
